/Tech1d ago

Together AI co-founder Percy Liang launches Simile AI to scale his Smallville generative agents research

The startup is hiring a game designer to build environments.

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Joon Sung Park@joon_s_pk

Simulation and AGI were the twin pillars of advanced civilizations in all my favorite sci-fi. When we created Smallville and agents in 2023, the romantic in me couldn’t resist devoting my career to it -- now with an incredible team @simile_ai.

Fun conversation @sonyatweetybird!

Sonya Huang 🐥@sonyatweetybird

The advanced civilizations of sci-fi legend (Banks, Asimov, etc) have some form of simulation to guide society.

@joon_s_pk is taking a crack at building that simulator with @simile_ai.

As Joon's cofounder @percyliang puts it: great science starts with a great measurement. From Smallville in 2023 to today, Simile is trying to build the Hubble Telescope equivalent for simulating human behavior.

00:00 Introduction 01:49 Building Generative Agents 02:29 Valentines Day Emergence 03:33 From GPT 3 To Agents 05:03 Social Computing Problem 06:19 Social Simulacra Subreddits 07:57 Models Getting Good Enough 08:57 Humans Are Not Rational 10:04 Turning Research Into Simuli 11:55 Validation And Accuracy Proof 12:43 Customer Workflow CVS Example 16:11 Why Collect Real Data 17:51 Behavioral Signals And RCTs 21:52 Use Cases And Second Order Effects 26:31 Evaluating Convergence Divergence 31:58 Big Societal Simulations Ahead 36:08 Future Of Simulation

1:04 PM · Jun 22, 2026 · 16.8K Views

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Users are excited about Simile AI's launch by Percy Liang because it builds on familiar ideas like Smallville for simulating human behavior at scale.

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Joon Sung Park@joon_s_pk

Back to the roots :) Come build with us!

Mihika Kapoor@mihikapoor

I’m hiring a video game designer @simile_ai

The first thing we ever built was a top-down pixel-art town called Smallville. It looked like a game, but the characters were the world's first ai agents living their own lives.

Now we're building simulated worlds full of people who act like people, and we want a website that feels like one too.

if you obsess over games, sprites, systems, worldbuilding, behavior, and making things feel alive, DMs are open :)

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Prem🗽@premxai

All the very best and excited to see what you guys @simile_ai have been doing

smallville was my starting point, been building an emotion engine for simulated agents with real personas ever since. grounding the affect in appraisal + homeostatic drives rather than leaving it to LLM narration, and benchmarking the behaviour against Gallup data to see how close it lands to real humans. super curious how you're approaching the emotion + behaviour matching at Simile?

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